A web page is a resource available via a network, such as the Internet, usually formatted with HTML or secure HTML and including hypertext links to enable navigation from one page or section to another. Web pages are typically viewed using a web browser. Web pages may contain a variety of elements that are visible in the web browser, such as text, graphics, audio, interactive multimedia content, and applets. Web pages also contain content that cannot be viewed in the browser, such as scripts, meta tags, Cascading Style Sheets, comments, and so on.
A website is a collection of web pages, typically stored in a single folder or within related subfolders on a web server. A website typically also includes an index page, which is a file with a special name, defined in the web server's configuration. When a visitor requests a web page at a particular URL, the web server associated with that URL will look for an index page and serve that to the user's browser. If no index page exists, a listing of the folder's contents, or an error page will be displayed (depending on other web server settings).
The proliferation of web pages available via the Internet creates an increasing competition among web page developers to design their web pages so that they are easy to use. Typically, web pages contain both information that users may be looking for and advertisements promoting various kinds of products or services. Often, the advertisements are supplied to the web pages by third parties that are different from the web page developers. In return for displaying these advertisements, the web page developers are compensated by the third parties. The compensation amount is often related to how many users visit the web page, and how many users view or click on the advertisements.
As a result, it can be important for web page developers to be able to monitor the traffic flow both on individual web pages and on groups of web pages with sufficient granularity, in order to get a better understanding about the users' behavior and what effects various redesigns of web pages have on the users' behavior. While there is a great amount of raw user data available representing users' behavior with respect to web pages, it generally takes a lot of processing power and time to glean useful information from the raw data. Furthermore, because of the processing power and time requirement, it is difficult to interact with the data in a timely manner.